


Apex

by oceansinmychest



Category: Wentworth (TV)
Genre: Dinner, Drinking & Talking, F/F, Jonia if you squint, One Shot, Season/Series 05, Talking, interactions, potential, untapped potential
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 18:46:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15443463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oceansinmychest/pseuds/oceansinmychest
Summary: Two predators reach a high point. Joan and Sonia dine alone in the cafeteria.





	Apex

**Author's Note:**

> These two had a lot of potential with their interactions. Thought I'd bridge the gap.

The arrangement’s been made. Tonight, the cafeteria is empty save for two ambitious women. From behind the glass, a guard looms to prevent impending chaos. Linda Miles has received a handsome enough bribe so she doesn’t feel inclined to intervene. Her wallet’s stuffed full of gambling potential.

Wentworth’s newest Top Dog faces the clock on the wall which ticks, ticks, ticks. Joan Ferguson would have preferred to marinate and cook the dishes herself, but mousey little Vera has become an awful thorn in her side as of late.

Prison is neither Attica nor Ides. No fine Austrailian cuisine fills these bowls. Joan learns to improvise. The inmates, quivering in fear and quick to obey, prepared the appetizers and main course. A medium rare cut, exposed and bleeding, lays on the table. The plastic tray represents a mortuary slab.

The former Governor sits in a monolithic fashion while harboring the bitterness of an ex masked by strategy. The stiff bench digs into her curved bottom. She folds her lying hands together, as if to say grace.

The art of dining is meant to be perceived as a truce. With bitterness wedged in her mouth, she (briefly) reflects on her evening with Vera. How it all went wrong. Tonight’s late-night meal presents a distraction from the mind and ego.

Hardly a gorgeous St. Petersburg feast, this rendition of the Last Supper has all the dishes, folded napkins, and clean cups set on a cafeteria table. No apostle occupies the seat beside her.

The music – Tchaikovsky -- softens. Then, stills. An old, confiscated radio crackles dead noise. She shrugs her strong shoulders, ponytail flagged to the right.

“Hello, Sonia,” she drawls. “I’m afraid Miss Miles prohibited the use of china. We make do.”

She conducts herself with frigid politeness. 

Sonia Stevens is the type of woman who derives satisfaction from pulling the wings off flies. There’s no heart in that bone thin body. Her death will come to her and it will be just.

Flawlessly, Stevens makes her entrance. She purses her overworked lips. Her cheap, plastic smile’s stretched far too tightly. She easily imagines herself in a long, backless cocktail dress that made her angles look graceful yet lethal. 

The teal buttons up to her scrawny throat. Her perfect, brown hair forms perfect half-waves. She brings a gift in tow. With her vulgar opulence, Sonia grips it by the neck. Neat whiskey gains its identity outside of an unlabeled shampoo bottle. She sets the liquor down along with the contents of this dollhouse set-up.

“Vintage,” Sonia says. “Aged in oak.” She could tell anyone the different between scotch, whiskey, and cognac. Only the cultured understand.

She has all the right connections. Like Kay Gonda, she fled into the night sans a black hat. Now, she’s here in prison which teems with snakes.

Hedonism plagues Sonia like a virus. She has an appetite for destruction. She plagues and Joan plagues and that makes them similar after all.

“Thank you,” Joan replies, her tone reminiscent of someone who doesn’t quite understand _gratitude_.  “No beets?” She quips with tart innocence, canting her head. She imagines them bloody and raw, the way her nursemaid served them well into her adolescence.

Sonia has a difficult time hiding her disgust.

The Devil unfolds her steam-pressed napkin, only to drape it across her statuesque lap.

She settles herself at the far end of the table, oceans between them. Narcissus demands praise. Psychopathic tendencies flare beneath the surface.

Again, Sonia manages a perfect smile that’s too tight against her face, making artificiality apparent. Her green eyes sparkle. A cold heart freezes beneath her ribcage.

They act like old, hungry gods.

“Joan, my dear, I’d much prefer some ambient lighting to set the mood. A candelabra, perhaps.”

Expecting to be served hand and foot, the mighty aristocrat chats. As slippery as an eel, she wears her mistrust. Her jackal grin tightens.

Shadows crawl beneath Joan’s death defying eyes. Her metal thinking sings the tune of a classic stoic. She navigates from one chess problem to the next. So, she’s cold and doesn’t suit the mindless masses’ ideal.

“Ha,” she chokes out a dusty scoff, as if it’s a joke. “I suspect you know why I called for you.”

Her remark accompanies a grand flourish of the wrist.

A trace of bleach permeates the air and taints the meal that’s much too rich for prison. Decadent and gluttonous, each dish suits high rise living. 

Everyone makes bargains, including these two. It’s not a desperate ploy on Joan’s part. She sniffs out weakness and brings the vulnerable to light. Sonia Stevens is a reckoning - a toy to see what makes her tick.

“Ah, ah.” Sonia admonishes the way Ivan used to. Her palm pushes forward. “Drink with me, Joan,” she demands as if she doesn’t have a problem.

Such is the way with those who want to rule.

Her upper lip nearly peels back. The prison-issues uniform traps her. She bristles in her skin. Her gaze is sharp enough to bite.  sees the tar black darkness within. Ave Cesaria.

Joan is the absence of light. She listens with her wolfish ears. Secrets are hers to covet and exploit.

Stevens fills their glasses which aren’t actually glass.

“To chaos theory,” Joan toasts with her half-empty plastic cup which Sonia failed to poison. She swallows in three, large gulps, pretending to enjoy the burn of this lighter fluid. She prefers vodka: crystal clear and twice as deadly. “From chaos, we may establish order.”

Always with the similes, metaphors, and petty villainous games

“Please eat. No one will take your meal from you, St—” A pause is a timed measure. “ _Sonia_.”

As is the case with high-brow earth, staring at Stevens makes her impossible to decode. Succulent meat splits in two. Cutlery slices, taps, and sleeps on the table.

These are women of iron and mechanized vows, they’re steam engines and turbines oiled by grandeur and falsified excellence. Control matters a great deal to them.

With an attention to detail, Joan offers a barbed wire stare. She realizes that Sonia prefers to ruminate, talk, and philosophize rather than remain quiet. The heiress speaks  _after_ she swallows.

“There’s a lot of negative energy in this place, you know. Frankly, I cannot _fathom_ how you could withstand working here,” she comments to fill the void.

Sonia Stevens chews on lies and smiles. Like a cat batting around a half-dead mouse, she drags out the affair to make it messy. Thriving on the misery business, Liz just so happens to make for the perfect patsy. Joan is fun to toy with though a tad more _dangerous_.

In response, Joan’s nostrils flare. A victim to hubris sets down the knife.

Warfare relies on deception. They play a game that promises one big Dies Irae. People are pawns to the likes of them.

For this particular parry, she pours herself another finger of whiskey. Her knuckles bleach bone-white under the fluorescent light.

“In the courtyard, I recognized your potential,” Joan states simply. “You’re the same as I. When you sense blood in the water, you… Take care of iT.”

A cosmopolitan sips daintily, offering a quirked brow that suggests ‘do continue.’

Social niceties are dropped. Hypocrisy entertains as a parlor game would. No agreement could be reached so they lie about it.

“We are not murderers, Joan. I vehemently deny the claim,” Sonia protests. “Liars _always_ come undone.”

She executes her snide remarks with tact. A smile fails to reach her cat green eyes. The banter continues. Drags out. Becomes repetitive.

If all is dust, it doesn’t matter who they kill - Russian Roulette to claw their way to the bloody top, painted as cartoonish Bond villains.

A hand reaches across the table. Settles upon Sonia’s. She grips her by the wrist. Feels the bone. Feels the weakened pulse.

“You’ll ruin my manicure, Joan,” she quips and purrs her venomous threats.

Vanitas, vanitatum.

“You and I can achieve remarkable things together. Riddle me this: what _do_ you respond to, Stevens?”

Getting it out of her is like dismantling a bomb. She tests the wires, the blunt edge of her nail pressing into Sonia’s skin.

“Why should I care, Joan?”

Apathy mixes poorly like oil in water. She purses her lips caked evenly with smuggled-in cosmetics, her wrist twisting. Sonia never responds well to anything.

Joan loosens her titanic grip. It’s a gentle recoil, her thumb venturing up Sonia’s forearm before leaving entirely.

“You’ll grow restless in that metal cage they hold you in. You need to inflict harm, Stevens. I know you as well as I know myself.”

Looking into those green eyes, all Joan sees is the pupils, a familiar blackness that lured her in.

**Author's Note:**

> For clarification, Kay Gonda refers to the fictional actress in Ayn Rand’s “Ideal.”


End file.
